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The audience typically applauds at the end of showings of the film Argo. This is not surprising because the film is taut, well made, multi-layered, thoughtful, and funny. It is a tribute to Ben Affleck's growing skills and range as a director.
Argo is based on historical events during the Iranian hostage crisis in 1979. In the aftermath of the Iranian revolution, 52 staff members of the US Embassy were taken hostage and remained in captivity for 444 days. Six US diplomats escaped the embassy and hid in the residence of Ken Taylor, the Canadian Ambassador. Tony Mendez, a CIA operative with experience sneaking endangered individuals out of revolutionary Iran, masterminded an “exfiltration caper” whereby he pretended to be a film director scouting locations in Iran for a science fiction film entitled Argot. Individuals in Hollywood helped to make the fictional film project seem credible. Mendez successfully snuck the six embassy staff members out of the country by disguising them as his film production team.
As the lights went up in the theater after the film showing someone said to me, “I can't believe that actually happened!” I had to agree. But I wondered. What actually happened? Affleck took grief for some of the artistic liberties in this reconstruction of historical events - he said it was in the “spirit of the truth” - but I imagine we have no trouble granting him that. Still, my attention was drawn to the question of “actuality”.
The initial stab at the Actual is the non-fiction frame of the film - a brief history of the Iranian revolution that Affleck appended to the screenplay at the outset of the film, and, at the close, words by President Carter, the final text, and the pairs of photographs juxtaposing the real and the simulated. Such frame stories - often a narrator offering a flashback, here a non-fiction frame - typically present a context of reality within which the main story occupies a less certain status. In The Wizard of Oz or The Cabinet of Dr Caliga